Conclusion

Despite the numerous issues with victory identified in this book, a traditional notion of victory still holds sway today. Therefore, this conclusion extracts shared themes, emerging tensions, and further avenues of inquiry running through the book as a whole. To do so, it highlights the normative, political, and temporal dimensions of moral victory. Normative includes the importance of moral context for thinking about victory and efforts to reinterpret such thinking in more ethical terms. Political pertains to the relationship between dramatized notions of victory, (relaxed) limits on fighting, and an opposite interest in restraint. And temporal concerns whether victories actually mark clean and durable endings to war as well as the creative use of time to negotiate victory differently. These issues also connect the volume to International Relations and Security Studies literatures. We close by proposing how these reflections on victory might help reconstruct the just war tradition